my job rn is just building agents
the hard part about building agents isnt the framework it's discovery, context, traditional engineering, handling the last mile
there are some invariants like the loop, tools, observability, guardrails, monitors etc...
100% agreed, the "this is what an agent looks like to write" is the wrong pitch for a new agent framework.
The better pitch would be, "this is how easy observability, guardrails, monitoring, deployment, evals, versioning, A/B testing are with our framework." What the agent code looks like is somewhat incidental.
This this this!
Anyone have something they genuinely like for all of this? For now I'm rolling my own, but I can't believe I won't find a better OSS alternative soon...
Nvidia Openshell solves most of the hard problems I've run into while building stuff in this space.
Observability is, for my purposes, solved by a given framework supporting OpenTelemetry.
Guardrails is where I've gotten the most value of openshell being a neat package. Agent workload scope is written as policy in openshell, and capability is backed by openshell handling all execution.
Monitoring/deployment/versioning is helped as well, depending on how agents/runners are slotted into the system. Deployment namely is quite well supported- openshell has kube/helm bits that are experimental atm, but seem like a logical approach imho.
Evals and a/b testing isnt something ive explored in depth, considering that agents with composable tool sets + frontier models are beyond my expectations already.
We need the equivalent of the MEAN / LAMP stackronym for agents.